Group News

2019 Group News

June 2019

CIERA graduate student Monica Gallegos Garcia was awarded a fellowship within the distinguished Ford Foundation Fellowship Program, administered by the Fellowship Office of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. “It’s a huge honor to be selected for this fellowship, specifically because of the pool of applicants. Since [the fellowship] is for increasing diversity in academia, I know the other applicants might have similar backgrounds as myself,” said Gallegos Garcia. Continue to the full news story.

May 2019

Researchers are using gravitational waves to better understand black holes. LIGO’s detectors are sensitive to stellar mass black holes up to 100 times the mass of the sun—and quite efficient at finding them, too, compared to X-ray telescope efforts since the 1970s. If you count both black holes in each merger, “we’re now at the point where we’ve discovered as many [stellar mass black holes] with gravitational waves as we have with X-rays,” says Christopher Berry of Northwestern University. Continue to the full news story.

“Seekers of gravitational waves are on a cosmic scavenger hunt. Since the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory turned on in 2015, physicists have caught these ripples in spacetime from several exotic gravitational beasts — and scientists want more.This week, LIGO and its partner observatory Virgo announced five new possible gravitational wave detections in a single month, making what was once a decades-long goal almost commonplace (SN Online: 5/2/19)…. Continue to the full news story.

“The first month of LIGO-Virgo’s third observing run has been truly amazing, potentially bringing us the discovery of the so far missing third, hybrid class of mergers – a neutron star merging with a black hole,” said Professor Vicky Kalogera, Director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics at Northwestern University and member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, in an emailed statement. Continue to the full news story.

April 2019

The LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors are set to resume their hunt for gravitational waves on April 1. This go-around, they’ll be even more sensitive thanks to a set of upgrades to their lasers, mirrors, and other components. This next run will be a big deal—for different reasons than the first two observation sessions. Continue to the full news story.

Rainer Weiss, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the historic observation of gravitational waves, will deliver the Heilborn Lectures at Northwestern University on April 2, 3 and 5. They are free and open to all. The first two talks are of a technical nature, and the last one is for a lay audience. Continue to the full news story.

February 2019

Though the gravitational-wave signals provide a wealth of information about the pre-merger binaries, we haven’t yet been able to determine how these black-hole binaries formed in the first place. Did these pairs evolve in isolation? Or were they born from interactions in the dense centers of star clusters? One overlooked piece of data might shed light on these questions in the future: eccentricity. Since black-hole binaries in isolation take a long time to merge, any initial eccentricity in the orbit will be damped by gravitational-wave emission by the time the merger happens. But what if the binary doesn’t evolve in isolation? Could we see an imprint of eccentricity on the gravitational-wave signal then? A new study led by scientist Michael Zevin (Northwestern University and CIERA) explores one possible channel for eccentric mergers: chaotic interactions between multiple black-hole binaries in the centers of star clusters. Continue to the full news story.

January 2019

CIERA graduate students Aprajita Hajela and Eve Chase coordinated a trip for middle school students to visit Dearborn Observatory on an afternoon field trip on January 22. The students are associated with the local Youth and Opportunity United (Y.O.U.) program in Evanston, IL. Continue to the full news story.

2018 Group News

December 2018

New detections and analysis of gravitational waves – announced Saturday, Dec. 1, at the Gravitational Wave Physics and Astronomy Workshop in College Park, Maryland – broaden scientists’ understanding of the entire population of stellar-mass black holes, which are formed from collapsing stars. Read the full article.

November 2018

CIERA Research Specialist Scotty Coughlin has been included in the list of honorable mentions in the inaugural (2018) LIGO Laboratory Awards for Excellence in Detector Characterization and Calibration. The honor is bestowed “for his role in the creation of Gravity Spy (gravityspy.org), a tool for citizen-scientists to assist the collaboration in classifying non-astrophysical transients in the detector data, and for the development of computational infrastructure to allow use of Gravity Spy results in other diagnostic analyses.” Read the full article.

October 2018

Founded ten years ago, the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) is celebrating a decade of astrophysics discovery and research, and the community joins in this commemoration through the annual public lecture series. The annual public lecture serves is a special event that connects Northwestern researchers, astronomers, students, and the public, for an evening exploring a timely and exciting astronomy topic. Past speakers include Nobel laureates Rainer Weiss and Kip S. Thorne, and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson; typically, the speaker is brought in from outside the university. The celebration of the tenth anniversary called for the selection of CIERA Director, Vicky Kalogera, as presenter. Read the full article.

September 2018

Humans of LIGO is an initiative which celebrates the vital cogs in this mega-science endeavor: individuals in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC). Founded in 1997, the LSC comprises of more than 1300 scientists and engineers from over 100 institutions and 18 countries worldwide. The Collaboration exhibits incredible diversity among its members, with people coming from all backgrounds and at various stages of their careers. Enjoy features on Kalogera group members Eve Chase and Scotty Coughlin. Read the full article. “As director of Northwestern’s Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics(CIERA), Vicky Kalogera has traveled the globe to talk about things beyond this world. Connecting the public to Northwestern’s work in astronomy is at CIERA’s core. With a special annual lecture series, the center brings campus and surrounding communities together to hear prominent astronomers speak on fascinating and timely topics. Past speakers have included Nobel laureates Rainer Weiss and Kip S. Thorne, and astrophysicist/author/science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson….” Read the full Northwestern Office for Research Article. Gravitational-wave scientist Christopher Berry has joined Northwestern this fall. His role at CIERA is that of both a researcher and a science manager, developing and maintaining the research of the CIERA Director, Vicky Kalogera. Christopher is supporting the Kalogera group’s graduate students as they work on a diverse range of interesting projects related to compact objects, stellar evolution and gravitational astrophysics. Read the full article.

July 2018

The 12th International LISA Symposium was held in Chicago July 8 – 13. The meeting was dedicated to gravitational wave astrophysics, with particular emphasis on sources that can be observed in the millihertz band by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), the current status and unique challenges in gravitational theory and analysis for LISA sources, and the latest updates on the development of the LISA mission. The Symposium was hosted by CIERA and co-sponsored by the American Astronomical Society, with CIERA professors Shane Larson and Fred Rasio leading the scientific organizing committee. About 240 people participated, including Northwestern researchers Katie Breivik, Eve Chase, Vicky Kalogera, Michael Katz, Kyle Kremer, Shane Larson, and Fred Rasio. Learn more about the LISA space mission. About 25 members of GWIC, the Gravitational Wave International Committee, met on July 8 at the start of the 12th International LISA Symposium. Formed over 20 years ago, the committee facilitates international collaboration and cooperation in the construction, operation and use of the major gravitational wave detection facilities world-wide. CIERA Director Vicky Kalogera helped host and organize, and CIERA sponsored the meeting. Learn more about GWIC and gravitational waves.

May 2018

This year’s World Science Festival in New York City featured an expert panel discussing black holes, including CIERA director Vicky Kalogera. Also featured was a video illustrating the collision of two neutron stars (GW170817), created by CIERA’s Aaron Geller. The World Science Festival is an educational non-profit which was founded 11 years ago by physicist Brian Greene. Read the full article. As part of its ongoing STEM event series, on May 17 The Chicago Network (TCN), an organization of Chicago’s leading professional women, partnered with CIERA to bring a panel discussion on this topic to an audience of 50. Vicky Kalogera (TCN member since 2013) and colleagues Raffaella Margutti and Wen-fai Fong, described their roles and experiences in the making of this ground-breaking discovery. With an introduction to the science from science communicator Shane Larson, the round-table discussion was moderated by Michelle Larson (TCN member since 2013), President and CEO of Adler Planetarium. Read the full article. Vicky Kalogera, faculty in Northwestern University’s Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, has been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. Membership in the academy is one of the highest honors given to a scientist in the United States. Kalogera, the Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished University Professor of Physics and Astronomy, is among 84 new members and 21 foreign associates elected in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Read the full Northwestern News announcement.

March 2018

Embassy of Greece Interviews CIERA Director Vicky Kalogera:“Our discussion with Professor Kalogera took place while she was waiting for a vacant space at Northwestern’s parking lot,” begins the Newsmaker of the Month feature interview in the March 2018 newsletter from the Embassy of Greece. Continue to the full interview.

February 2018

As part of a National Science Foundation meeting with congress on February 5, 2018, CIERA Director Vicky Kalogera was invited to meet one-on-one with U.S. Congressman John Culberson, from Texas. Professor Kalogera described and answered questions about the double neutron star merger that made impressive headlines in the fall of 2017. National Science Foundation Director France A. Córdova was present for the meeting. Continue to the full news story.

January 2018

On January 31, 2018, at the Allen Center, Northwestern University Weinberg Dean Adrian Randolph hosted an investiture ceremony honoring the new academic appointments of Weinberg’s endowed chair holders. Among those introduced was CIERA director Vicky Kalogera, who was named the Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Physics & Astronomy. Vicky came to Northwestern in 2001 as an assistant professor and previously held the title E. O. Haven Professor of Physics & Astronomy. Read the full article. Vicky Kalogera has been awarded the 2018 Dannie Heineman Prize for Astrophysics for her groundbreaking work studying compact objects — including black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs — in astrophysical systems. The award, administered by the American Institute of Physics (AIP) and the American Astronomical Society (AAS), cites Kalogera’s “fundamental contributions to advancing our understanding of the evolution and fate of compact objects in binary systems, with particular regard to their electromagnetic and gravitational wave signals.” Continue to the full Northwestern News announcement.

2017 Group News

November 2017

Professors Vicky Kalogera, Shane Larson, Raffaella Margutti and Wen-fai Fong welcomed an audience of about 200 for a science talk and moderated panel discussion on November 28 titled “Peering into the Cosmic Maelstrom”. The faculty described their roles and experiences in the making of the ground-breaking first-ever observation of a binary neutron star inspiral and merger, announced October 16. The event was introduced by Northwestern Vice President for Research Jay Walsh, and the panel discussion and audience question period was moderated by Adler Planetarium President, Michelle Larson.Read the full article.

Eve Chase was preparing for a final exam when she received an email that LIGO, the tandem observatories set to listen for gravitational waves emitted by cosmic events, had detected yet another binary black hole merger. Since that moment, Eve, a second-year doctoral student at Northwestern, devoted her efforts to studying the event, becoming the youngest person in the over 1,000 world-wide LIGO-Virgo collaboration of scientists to lead the analysis (called “parameter estimation”) of one of LIGO’s chirps.Read the full article.

October 2017

On October 16, 2017, scientists announced the first-ever observation of a binary neutron star inspiral and merger—this astronomical event will provide a powerful new way to understand the lives of stars and how they die and join the galactic graveyard. Vicky Kalogera, CIERA Director and Daniel I. Linzer Distinguished University Professor in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, served as lead astrophysicist on the panel at the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) press conference announcing the discovery.Read the full article.

Barry Barish, Kip Thorne and Rai Weiss received the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves. “I was so much hoping for this wonderful news,” said Vicky Kalogera, astrophysicist and Director of CIERA, who contributed to the historic detections as well. “My Northwestern colleagues and I warmly congratulate Rai, Kip and Barry on this recognition. The discovery of black-hole mergers and the detection of gravitational waves never would have happened without these creative scientists.”Read the full article.

September 2017

The LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC) and the Virgo collaboration announced today (Sept. 27) the first joint detection, made on August 14, of gravitational waves with both LIGO and Virgo detectors. It is the fourth announced detection of a binary black hole system and the first significant gravitational-wave signal recorded by the Virgo detector, located near Pisa, Italy.Read the full article.

At the LSC-Virgo September Meeting near Geneva, Switzerland, graduate student Eve Chase won the best poster award in the Data Analysis/Theory category. Eve is a second-year physics graduate student who is part of Vicky Kalogera’s group. Eve studies computational and data analysis techniques related to gravitational wave astronomy. Her poster, titled “Gravitational-Wave Localization in the LSST Era,” focused on using the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope to search for electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves.Read the full article.

The September 2017 issue of Sky & Telescope magazine features an article by Vicky Kalogera which gives her personal and professional account of the first gravitational wave events detected by LIGO. In the article, Prof.Kalogera describes the science behind the detections, their significance and promise, as well as the excitement in the astronomy community as these phenomenal occurrences unfolded.Access the September 2017 Issue.

June 2017

The Graduate School of Northwestern University has selected Fani Dosopoulou to receive the Holt Award. Named in honor of Helen Froelich Holt ’34, ‘38MS, it is a one-time award to help facilitate completion of the dissertation leading to a PhD. The prize is intended to provide monetary support in the student’s final year of writing and defense of the dissertation.Read the full story.

Northwestern Now reported on June 1, 2017 that “One, two and now three historic waves have come from deep space.” The press release continues: “The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) made the detection Jan. 4, 2017, demonstrating that a new window in astronomy has been firmly opened. Gravitational waves pass through Earth and can be “heard” by the extremely sensitive LIGO detectors. As was the case with the first two detections, the waves were generated when two black holes merged to form a larger black hole. The long-awaited triumph in September 2015 of the first-ever direct observation of gravitational waves completed Einstein’s vision of a universe in which space and time are interwoven and dynamic.”
Read the full Northwestern Now article.Read more on the CIERA web site.

May 2017

Congratulations to undergraduates Rebecca Diesing and Charles “Chase” Kimball, who jointly won the Department of Physics & Astronomy prize for best senior thesis, 2017. This award is given on behalf of the Undergraduate Curriculum Committee. Rebecca and Chase are both astronomy students; Rebecca works with Professor Farhad Yusef-Zadeh and Chase works with Professor Vicky Kalogera.Read the full story.

On May 5, 2017, CIERA Director, Vicky Kalogera was featured in Chicago Woman magazine’s “Women in STEM” column. Kalogera’s interview discussed her involvement with the LIGO team, and their discovery of gravitational waves. The interview also explored Kalogera’s upbringing and long-term interests in science, and what it is like to be a female researcher in a historically male-dominated field.Read the full Chicago Woman interview.

Vicky Kalogera has been honored as the winner of the 2017 Martin E. and Gertrude G. Walder Award for Research Excellence. This award is given to one faculty member annually by the Northwestern University Provost. Provost Linzer states, “Vicky is a highly prolific and influential scholar in the fields of physics and astronomy. She is a senior member of the international team that detected the first direct evidence of gravitational waves. With these data, her team also made the first direct observation of two black holes colliding.” Continue to the Northwestern News announcement or the Office of the Provost announcement.Read the Northwestern News announcement.Read the Office of the Provost announcement.

March 2017

The tenth issue of LIGO Magazine is now available for download. This issue focuses on LIGO’s second observation run, “O2”. In “Getting ready for O2: A data analysis perspective”, gravitational-wave astronomers Sarah Caudill and Vivien Raymond discuss preparing to analyze the new data. Vivien is a Northwestern PhD from CIERA Director Vicky Kalogera’s research group. Mike Zevin, a 3rd year doctoral student at Northwestern, penned a feature article, “The Gravity Spy Project: Machine learning and citizen science” highlighting the relationship between professional astronomers and citizen scientists which is making analyzing LIGO data more effective.Read the full story.

2016 Group News

December 2016

In December, several prestigious honors were announced for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, the team of scientists and engineers involved in the gravitational-wave discovery announced earlier this year. CIERA’s director, Vicky Kalogera, led the astrophysical interpretation of the discovery for the LIGO collaboration. Over the years, her group pioneered ways of making detection source rate predictions and developed methods for extracting information from gravitational-wave signals from binaries of spinning compact objects.Read the full story.

On December 1st and 2nd, Dave Reitze, the Executive Director of LIGO Laboratory at Caltech, visited Northwestern for a series of group meetings, a tour of the Laboratory for Atomic and Photonic Technology, and to present CIERA’s Fall Interdisciplinary Colloquium on the topic of gravitational waves detected by LIGO. Dr. Reitze, Northwestern alumnus class of 1983, met with LIGO Scientific Collaboration members Vicky Kalogera, Shane Larson, Selim Shahriar and several postdocs and students at Northwestern who contributed to the discovery (some of whom are pictured, left). His talk, titled, “Colliding Black Holes & Convulsions in Space-time: The First Observations of Gravitational Waves by LIGO,” included a description of LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory and the “powerful and unique probes of the universe” that LIGO captures.Read the Office for Research story.

October 2016

LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, is the most sensitive and complex gravitational experiment ever created. When researchers look at the information LIGO receives from the Universe, they also confront the instrumental and environmental noise the observatory picks up. Gravity Spy lets the lay public act as citizen scientists to help categorize noise, or glitches, in the massive amounts of data coming from the detectors here on Earth that first heard gravitational waves.

As the Gravity Spy team explains, “Humans still are far better than computers at recognizing subtle differences across images and when an image simply does not fit within a known category. Please help us identify all of the glitch morphologies and open up an even bigger window into the gravitational wave universe!”

The Gravity Spy team is made up of LIGO researchers within CIERA, LIGO researchers at Cal State Fullerton, machine learning researchers at Northwestern University, crowd-sourced science researchers at Syracuse University, and Zooniverse web developers. Gravity Spy is funded by the NSF INSPIRE 1547880 grant.

September 2016

CIERA postdoctoral fellow Laura Sampson is among five female scientists honored with the 2016 For Women in Science Fellowship from L’Oréal USA. The program recognizes exemplary female scientists for their contributions in STEM and their commitment to serving as role models for younger generations. As part of the award, Dr. Sampson will receive $60,000 to advance her postdoctoral research. Along with the other recipients, she will visit the White House, the National Academy of Sciences, a New Jersey public school, and L’Oréal Headquarters.

July 2016

Dr. Kalogera is hosting and mentoring 14 high school and college students from around the country this summer, who are each working on their own independent research projects. The students are also receiving guidance from CIERA’s Postdoctoral Fellow Chris Pankow, Post-Baccalaureate Research Fellow Scotty Coughlin, and Graduate Student Mike Zevin.

May 2016

Yuri Milner, a Russian entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and physicist, is giving $3 million as a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to honor the scientists and engineers involved in the gravitational-wave discovery announced earlier this year. $1 million will be shared equally by the three LIGO founders, Ronald Drever, Kip Thorne, and Rainer Weiss, and the remaining $2 million will be shared equally by the 1,012 contributors.Read the Breakthrough Prize announcement.

A second prestigious honor, the Gruber Foundation’s $500,000 Cosmology Prize, will be conferred to the founders and the entire LIGO team for “pursuing a vision to observe the universe in gravitational waves, leading to a first detection that emanated from the collision of two black holes.” The priz citation continues, “This remarkable event provided the first glimpse into the strong-gravity regime of Einstein’s theory of general relativity that governs the dynamics of black holes, giving direct evidence for their existence, and demonstrating that their nature is consistent with the predictions of general relativity.”Read the full press release on the Gruber Cosmology Prize.

During his undergraduate career at Northwestern, Kyle Kremer combined his love of the planets and music into a dual physics and trumpet degree. Now a graduate student in the Physics & Astronomy department, he brought that love to the broader Northwestern community in the Solar System Symphony concert on May 24th.Read the full story.

Emceed by WBEZ’s Nerdette Podcast hosts Tricia Bobeda and Greta Johnson, five of Chicago’s Arts and Sciences experts, including Vicky Kalogera, got just five minutes to spark imaginations with “en-lightning” ideas on May 10th. Co-hosted by The Phi Beta Kappa Society & The Phi Beta Kappa Association of the Chicago Area and held at the Chicago History Museum, over 200 members of the public enjoyed the talks, which were part of PBK’s Arts & Sciences Cities of Distinction program.View the (En)Lightning Talks.

April 2016

Graduate student Michael Zevin interacted with about 30 visiting students in two sessions during Take Our Daughters & Sons to Work Day 2016 at Norris University Center. He explained how much can be learned about our universe using light, even light invisible to humans, and showcased Northwestern’s historic Dearborn Telescope. The students used spectral tubes and diffraction gratings to explore how light can tell us what makes up galaxies billions of lightyears away. Mike also introduced the concept of spacetime and the recent observation of gravitational waves to the young enthusiasts!

Representatives from the National Science Foundation Mathematical and Physical Sciences (NSF MPS) Directorate came to Northwestern April 21st in a site visit organized by Northwestern’s Office for Research. The directorate is visiting a select number of institutions in 2016 to better understand the scientific opportunities, research landscape, and workforces they impact. Graduate student Niharika Sravan was among the 18 students invited to present posters in the Silverman Hall atrium as part of the visit.Read the full story on the NSF Site Visit.

To celebrate and highlight advanced research computing at Northwestern, the third annual Computational Research Day was held on April 19th. Highlights of the day included presentations from Northwestern researchers, guest speakers, the Visualization Challenge sponsored by NVIDIA and a poster session sponsored by CIERA and NICO (Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems). Physics and Astronomy graduate students Niharika Sravan and Mike Zevin presented posters. Mike took home the first prize of $1500 toward the conference of his choice for his poster on Gravity Spy and LIGO.Read the full story on Computational Research Day.

February 2016

The National Science Foundation and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration have announced that their scientists have successfully, for the first time, directly detected gravitational waves – or ripples in the fabric of spacetime – using the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). Learn why this discovery is important.

Through their dedicated research, CIERA faculty, postdocs, graduate and undergraduate students contributed to this momentous scientific discovery!

Go to the full Northwestern News Special Feature.Read an interview with Vicky Kalogera from only one year ago with her thoughts about the search for gravitational waves. Watch the 5 minute video in which Vicky Kalogera and Shane Larson explain the discovery. Read the astrobites post by Mike Zevin. Astrobites is an online journal written by astronomy graduate students. Learn more about LIGO, the collaboration of more than 1000 scientists worldwide who joined together in the search for gravitational waves.

2015 Group News

November 2015

Dr. Vicky Kalogera was elected to the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope Corporation’s (LSSTC) Executive Board of Directors. In this capacity, Dr. Kalogera will participate in the oversight and administration of the Corporation.

October 2015

Dr. Vicky Kalogera was awarded the 2016 Hans A. Bethe Prize from the American Physical Society (APS). The award recognizes outstanding work in theory, experiment or observation in the areas of astrophysics, nuclear physics, nuclear astrophysics or closely related fields. It is open to any scientist working in these areas, worldwide, and is presented annually by the APS divisions of astrophysics and nuclear physics. Dr. Kalogera will be honored with the Bethe prize at a recognition ceremony during the April, 2016 meeting of the APS. The Bethe is the only astrophysics prize within the APS. Dr. Kalogera’s citation reads, “For key contributions to the study of the electromagnetic and gravitational wave radiation from binary compact objects, including the now-verified prediction that neutron star mergers produce short gamma-ray bursts that will be found in all galaxy types.”

October 1 – 3, 2015, CIERA hosted the Midwest Relativity Meeting (MRM) with over 100 participants from across North America, including some of the leading experts in the country on the theory of relativity. The annual MRM aims to bring together researchers from across the Midwest and beyond to discuss general relativity and a broad range of topics in gravitational physics (classical and quantum gravity, numerical relativity, relativistic astrophysics, cosmology, gravitational waves, and experimental gravity). View the Scientific Program from the 2015 MRM.

September 2015

Despite intermittently cloudy skies, over 1,700 people joined CIERA faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students to watch the total lunar eclipse on Sunday night, September 27th, 2015. Setting up three telescopes on the top floor of the Segal Visitors Center on the south campus of Evanston, CIERA volunteers welcomed Northwestern students & staff and members of the public to take part in this event. View the Northwestern News eclipse story and the Daily Northwestern eclipse story.

Niharika Sravan was invited by physics teacher Katie Page to speak at Prospect High School in Mt. Prospect, IL. Mrs. Page runs the Women in STEM club, which includes a speaker series aimed at inspiring young women to pursue their interests in the science fields.

Each quarter, Mrs. Page invites a panel of guest speakers to come and talk to Prospect’s high school girls about the speakers’ educational backgrounds, professions, how they got into their STEM fields, and “what it’s really like.” View the Chicago Tribune story about the Prospect High School Women in STEM Club.

August 2015

CIERA Director Vicky Kalogera spoke to nearly 40 Office for Research staff members at NU Knowledge at Noon, a faculty research presentation series. The series is designed to allow staff to learn directly from Northwestern faculty about the exciting research that takes place at our institution. The series also aims to foster connections across Office for Research staff by providing the opportunity for them to meet in person.

In her talk, “NU Astronomy: Big Data, Telescope Innovation, and the Cosmos,” Dr. Kalogera covered a brief history of astronomy, but she focused mainly on the very near future: the importance of big data and the value of two large, related initiatives, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO).

April 2015

The National Science Foundation has awarded a prestigious Graduate Fellowship to Kyle Kremer; Kyle worked with Professor Vicky Kalogera as an undergraduate student at Northwestern, and will be rejoin CIERA and the Department of Physics & Astronomy in the Fall as a graduate student. Congratulations Kyle!

A Northwestern team led by CIERA Director Vicky Kalogera has been awarded a 5-year, $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation to help train graduate students in the interdisciplinary fields of data analytics and Big Data. The program, entitled “From the Earth and the Universe to the Successful Careers of the Future”, was one of only eight proposals funded across the country, out of approximately 240 proposals that were received by the NSF. Professor Kalogera and her team designed a two-year graduate certificate program that includes, for example, the Big Data challenges of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope and the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, and the EarthScope seismic observatory project. The program will also give graduate students the chance to improve their communication skills, learn about parallel programming and visualization, and take part in summer internships at national labs and in industry. Over the 5-year duration, the program with provide graduate fellowships for 35 students selected from a wide range of existing PhD programs.

March 2015

Two new group members will be joining us in September as postdocs: Laura Sampson and Chris Pankow will both join our LIGO research group. Laura comes from Montana State University is an expert in Bayesian statistics, parameter estimation and model selection for gravitational-wave sources in connection to both interferometric detectors and pulsar-timing arrays. Chris is an expert in a wide range of methods for gravitational-wave signal searches from both burst and binary coalescence events. As Advanced LIGO starts observations this coming Fall we are looking forward to welcoming them both to our group!

February 2015

A new paper “On the Formation of Ultraluminous X-ray Sources with Neutron Star Accretors: the Case of M82 X-2” by Tassos Fragos (Geneva Observatory), Tim Linden (U Chicago), Vicky Kalogera (Northwestern), and Panos Sklias (Geneva Observatory) is now accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. Vicky with her past students and now collaborators, Tassos and Tim, and Tassos’ student Panos consider the newly discovered ultraluminous X-ray source M82 X-2, which surprised us by revealing a neutron star accretor instead of the typically assumed intermediate-mass black hole. The team found that, as long as mass-transfer from the massive companion is non-conservative, the system is consistent with expectations from population synthesis models of high-mass X-ray binaries.

LIGO Generations, a new film documenting the history of gravitational wave astronomy and the dramatic next phase about to unfold with Advanced LIGO, was released just last week. It can be watched online. Accompanying the film, the LIGO Scientific Collaboration will host a web AMA (“Ask me anything”) session on the reddit r/science channel starting Friday February 13th at 12:00 pm CST.

January 2015

We are happy to announce a Public Outreach activity we are launching within CIERA for the duration of 2015. These events are inspired by the 100 year anniversary of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Guests will have the opportunity to meet CIERA postdoctoral associates, graduate and undergraduate students on the last Friday of every month at Dearborn Observatory on the Northwestern campus. They will discuss their research, share some exciting visualizations, and answer questions. You can find further details here. We look forward to seeing you there! Read Full story from Northwestern News.

2014 Group News

November 2014

Northwestern University and Evanston Township High School(ETHS) share more than just the Evanston community; they also work together on a variety of education programs to help inspire students. A `Kits and Cats’ celebration, to be held on Northwestern’s campus on Thursday night, November 13th, will highlight and further strengthen those connections. A great example of collaboration between Northwestern (the “Cats”) and ETHS (the “Kits”) is CIERA’s NSF/NU “Reach for the Stars” program. This program connects graduate students to high-school teachers at ETHS and throughout Chicago; it is led by CIERA Director Vicky Kalogera, and managed by Program Director Michelle Paulsen with help from OSEP Director Kemi Jona and Assistant Professor Darren Gergle.

August 2014

The fifth issue of LIGO Magazine is now available for download. This issue celebrates the major milestone of the first full lock being achieved. It also contains articles about the Transmission Monitor Suspension Telescope, what life is like at the Louisiana LIGO site, and an interview with Kai Staats, the creator of the documentary “LIGO: A passion for understanding.” Former Northwestern postdoctoral fellow Diego Fazi and others talk about their careers and what they have done after working with LIGO in the article “Life after LIGO”. There is also a feature on former CIERA graduate student Ben Farr’s thesis defense. Past issues of LIGO magazine can be found online.

July 2014

Prof. Vicky Kalogera, was elected as the astrophysics trustee, among only nine trustees, of the NSF-funded Aspen Center for Physics on July 9. The ACP is a center for physicists that offers long-term workshops, conferences, and research opportunities for those invited to attend. ACP Trustees provide overall scientific, financial, and administrative guidance; typically, only one or at most two astrophysics positions open up every decade. Congratulations, Vicky!

June 2014

CIERA is pleased to host a group of talented student researchers this summer. Among these students, nine have been awarded funding from Weinberg College and NASA’s Illinois Space Grant Consortium. The two students from Vicky Kalogera’s graoup are listed below, with their projects:

A recent paper co-authored by Ben Farr (Graduate Student), Will Farr (former Postdoctoral Fellow) and Ilya Mandel (former member of Vicky Kalogera’s research group) received a positive review on Astrobites. The paper that was reviewed is entitled “The First Two Years of Electromagnetic Follow-Up with Advanced LIGO and Virgo”; the review can be found here.

May 2014

Scotty Coughlin, an undergraduate student who has been working in Vicky Kalogera’s LIGO group, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. Starting in September 2014, the award will allow Coughlin to pursue LIGO-related at Cardiff University in Wales. There he will work with Professor Patrick Sutto. It is estimated that this year the Fulbright U.S. Student Program will have awarded scholarships to 48 of the 938 students who applied to study in the United Kingdom. At Cardiff, Scotty will be pursuing a Masters of Philosophy in Gravitational Waves Physics. He will develop a dedicated low latency, i.e. quick turnaround, supernova detection pipeline, to catch the next Galactic core-collapse supernova and determine the explosion mechanism.

CIERA Director Vicky Kalogera was featured in a Weinberg Magazine article entitled “Staying in Stem – Encouraging Women to Persist in Math and Science”. The article interviews female Northwestern faculty members about their experience as women pursuing careers in male-dominated STEM fields. Each faculty member interviewed cites examples of the lack of female role models in their field. Kalogera specifically mentions that she never had a female physics professor. Though studies have shown that women are no less capable than men in STEM fields, young girls are still getting the mistaken message that boys are better at math and science. In addition, girls are generally not raised to stand up for themselves or their work; this combative skill is essential in the scientific world: researchers are frequently called upon the defend their work and must compete for top positions. Kalogera also mentions that the lack of balance can come from the female scientists themselves when it comes to seeking a position: she cites the example of women not applying for a postdoc position or waiting until her husband has a position and then applying at his institution. Also, culturally, it can be more comfortable for a woman to stay at home and raise a family for a few years while their partner works. Kalogera points out that she does not think the discrepancy or discrimination of women in STEM fields is intentional. She says that “there’s a long history of discrimination that, up until rather recently, was accepted and considered normal. It’s hard to get rid of that over one or two generations.” In the full article Kalogera and her colleagues stress the need for women to continue to pursue careers in STEM fields. Kalogera states, “we can’t change the effects of this (gender disparity in STEM) without making people aware of the magnitude of the problem.”Read Full Article.

Congratulations to Ben Farr of successfully defending his thesis on Monday May 4th. Ben was a Graduate student with Vicky Kalogera’s group and his thesis was entitled “Extracting Astrophysical Information from the Gravitational Waves of Compact Binary Mergers and Their Electromagnetic Counterparts.” It focused on the development and validation of data analysis tools that will be used to characterize compact binary mergers from the gravitational waves they emit. These tools will be used to analyze the data coming from the newly upgraded LIGO and Virgo ground-based gravitational wave detectors coming online starting next year.

April 2014

You can now get an inside look at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) team and instrument with the, documentary, “LIGO — A Passion for Understanding“, released April 15th at space.com. Watch the documentary to learn more about the instrument which uses two and a half mile-long laser beams to detect cataclysmic cosmic events which occurred trillions of miles from Earth. You will also learn about the LIGO Scientific Collaboration: a group of almost a thousand scientists from all across the globe seeking to make the first direct detection of gravitational waves. As a part of that team, CIERA Director Vicky Kalogera, has built a gravitational-wave astrophysics group consisting of Postdoctoral Associate Tyson Littenberg, Graduate Student Ben Farr, and a team of undergraduate students. Together, they are developing develop cutting-edge methods to help us understand black holes from the complex data produced by LIGO.

March 2014

Graduate Student Ben Farr, who works in Professor Vicky Kalogera‘s group, has been awarded the Robert R. McCormick Fellowship at the University of Chicago. He will start his work there on July 1st, focusing on gravitational-wave astronomy, and in particular, on the detection and characterization of compact binary mergers from their gravitational-wave and electromagnetic signatures.

2013 Group News

October 2013

Graduate student Ben Farr received the “Blue Apple Award” at this year’s Midwest Relativity Meeting for the best student presentation at the meeting. Ben’s talk was entitled “A Hierarchical Approach to Rapid Gravitational Wave Parameter Estimation”, and described his work on quickly and accurately extracting new constraints on compact objects from future gravitational-wave detections.

Nick Cowan, CIERA Postdoctoral Fellow, will speak as part of Chicago Ideas Week. His talk will be in the “Scientific Breakthroughs: Infinite Possibilities” series on Tuesday October 15th (12:00pm-1:30pm; tickets available at the Chicago Ideas Week website), and will touch on his research in exoplanet climates and exo-cartography.

September 2013

The new issue of LIGO Magazine is now available for download. The issue contains several articles on the topic of “squeezed light” and its history in the gravitational wave community. The first and second issues (also available) contained articles about building Advanced LIGO and about observing black holes in LIGO, respectively. The second issue included “Black Holes in Advanced LIGO: the observational payoff” by Ilya Mandel (a previous CIERA Postdoc) and Ben Farr (currently a graduate student in CIERA).

July 2013

Vicky Kalogera addresses the mystery of black hole masses in ‘Sky and Telescope’ Magazine ‘What keeps you up at night?’ That’s the kind of question that Sky & Telescope magazine asked top astronomers for its special edition magazine: ‘Astronomy’s 60 Greatest Mysteries‘. CIERA Director Vicky Kalogera‘s article addressed the unanswered question of “How light or heavy can a black hole be?”. In the article, she discusses ongoing research to understand the upper and lower bounds of the mass of black holes. Find the full article in Sky and Telescope.

April 2013

A Day with Northwestern April 20, 2013. Join fellow alumni, friends, and current students for this all-day seminar featuring prominent faculty and alumni speaking on a variety of timely topics. Choose from 14 lectures to personalize your class schedule and enjoy engaging discussions with alumni and friends.Prof. Vicky Kalogera, E. O. Haven Professor of Physics & Astronomy and Director for CIERA, will be presenting in the afternoon session (1:45 – 2:45pm).NU Astronomy: Listening to Black Holes What are black holes? How can we be sure they exist? About a century ago, Einstein developed the now-accepted theory of gravity, known as General Relativity; black holes were predicted by that theory, and 40 years ago astronomers found some indirect evidence for their existence. However, it is now anticipated that direct proof of black holes will be found before the end of this decade: astronomers at Northwestern and the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA) are involved in a race for the first direct detection of a new type of wave emission that originates strong from black holes. Dr. Kalogera will discuss this sound-like emission and how it will open a brand-new window onto the extreme universe of black holes and the warped space and time around them.

2012 Group News

December 2012

Dr. Francesca Valsecchihas been named a “Young Star” of the American Physical Society’s Division of Astrophysics! Francesca has been selected for this early career recognition award in appreciation of her research on the interactions of stars in binary-star systems. For this award, she will give an invited talk as part of the Division of Astrophysics’ 2013 Early Career Recognition Lectures at a special session of the 2013 April meeting of the American Physical Society.

Francesca joined the Ph.D. program in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, working on high energy physics with Prof. Bruno Gobbi. One year after, she joined Prof. Vicky Kalogera‘s group in CIERA and began working on theoretical astrophysics. Francesca received her doctorate in September 2012. Her thesis was titled, “Compact Objects In Binary Systems: Formation and Evolution of X-ray Binaries and Tides in Double White Dwarfs”.

She is currently continuing her research at Northwestern University as a postdoctoral associate, working with Prof. Fred Rasio and Prof. Kalogera.

Congratulations, Francesca!

October 2012

The Institute’s scientific advisory and assessment Board is made up of internationally renowned physicists. The Board advises the President of the Max Planck Society (MPG) on how effectively the Directors are managing the work of the Institute. Their advice helps the Directors to establish priorities and improve their management. The Scientific Advisory Board is the main tool used by the MPG to evaluate its research institutes to ensure appropriate and effective development of funds. Every two years the members of the Board meet for several days to evaluate the Institute and to prepare a report to the President of the MPG.

At Argonne, he will channel his computational and applied math skills into pursuing his passion for renewable energies: Diego will be working on the development of fuels that can be created using solar energy. (One of the most famous examples of this process is using solar power to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen, to isolate hydrogen as a fuel.) Of course, if we can make fuels using solar power, those fuels will help us to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. But, to produce large quantities of these fuels, engineers need specially designed substances called catalysts that help speed the production of the fuel. Diego will be using high-performance computers, and his experience with algorithms developed for gravitational-wave studies, to analyze X-ray measurements of these catalysts and understand their structure. His work on these catalysts will help scientists make progress towards the goal of developing new, abundant, renewable energy sources for the world.

June 2012

Dan Stevens was awarded honors for his outstanding research, “Interpolation Techniques for MCMC Parameter Estimation on Compact Binary Coalescence Graviational-Wave Signals” and received the “Outstanding Senior Thesis in Physics and Astronomy” award for 2012!.

Carl Rodriguez received honorable mention (joint second place) and a 100-euro prize at the GWPAW 2012 meeting! Poster Title: “Inadequacies of the Fisher Matrix in the Advanced Detector Era”. More details here.

May 2012

Alex Ayerdi has been awarded a Weinberg Undergraduate Research Grant in the amount of $3000.00. His specific research consists of learning about and implementing the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to optimize the processing time of data coming from the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO). More info here.

Kevin Broh-Kahn, has been awarded a Northwestern University Summer Undergraduate Research Grant. Congratulations Kevin! The title of his independent research project is: “Performance and Data Analysis of Parallel Monte Carlo Algorithm for Simulating Dense Stellar Systems”.

Ben Farr, Physics & Astronomy graduate student, an NSF Graduate Fellow, and a member of Prof. Vicky Kalogera’s group, has been elected Student Representative for the American Physical Society’s Topical Group in Gravitation. The names of all 2012 GGR officers are here. Here is a little more information about the Topical Group in Gravitation.

Kyle Kremer, will be presenting a talk titled “Spin Tilts in the Double Pulsar Reveal Supernova Spin Angular-Momentum Production” at the Undergraduate Research and Arts Exposition – Monday, May 21st! The talk will be part of the Developments and Innovations in Science and Engineering panel which takes place from 1pm-2:30pm in the Lake Room on the second floor of Norris. More details here.

“Predictions for the Rates of Compact Binary Coalescences Observable by Ground-Based Gravitational-Wave Detectors” becomes most-cited in its journal, Classical and Quantum Gravity. Click here for more details.

February 2012

Dr. Tyson Littenberg accepts offer for a research postdoctoral position in our gravitational-wave group, a group member of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Tyson will join us following his postdoctoral position at the University of Maryland and NASA’s Goddard Flight Center. His primary research will focus on extracting physical information from LIGO/Virgo gravitational-wave signals.

Graduate student Vivien Raymond accepted an offer for the Richard Chase Tolman Postdoctoral fellowship in Experimental Physics; he will be moving to Caltech following his PhD graduation in Summer 2012. He works in Kalogera’s research group on physical parameter estimation of gravitational waves from binary coalescence with spinning compact objects within the LIGO Scientific Collaboration. Congratulations Vivien!

Dan Stevens has been selected to receive the J. G. Nolan Scholarship for the 2011-2012 academic year. The scholarship money is replacing funds from another financial aid grant that NU gave to Dan previously, so it’s being applied towards tuition (and the like) for the Winter and Spring Quarter.

January 2012

Tsing Wai Wong, a graduate student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy, won a CIC – Smithsonian Institution Predoctoral Fellowship! Tsing Wai is a member of Prof. Vicky Kalogera’s research group. Tsing Wai is 1 of 6 students to be awarded this fellowship. He will receive a stipend of $30,000 for one year, and conduct research at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO). He will work with Dr. Jeffrey E. McClintockand Dr. Ramesh Narayan at the SAO, who will be his research adviser and co-adviser. His fellowship starts on Aug 1, 2012 and ends on July 31, 2013. He will work on modeling the observed X-ray binaries in our Galaxy, which all host a black hole. The goal is to find out the progenitor mass of the black hole and the possible momentum kick imparted to the black hole during its formation through a core collapse event. He will also work on the hydrodynamics simulation of core collapse supernova to check whether the current core collapse theory can match the results he found in modeling the observed X-ray binaries. He will collaborate with Dr. Chris Fryer of the Los Alamos National Laboratory for the hydrodynamics simulations of core collapse.

Kyle Kremer, a senior double-majoring in Physics and Trumpet Performance (trumpet and flugelhorn), and a Goldwater Scholar and a Robert C. Byrd Scholar, has won the Churchill Scholarship! Kyle conducts research on compact objects in binary systems in Prof. Vicky Kalogera’s group. With the Churchill Scholarship, Kyle will be pursuing a Masters of Advanced Study degree in theoretical astrophysics at the University of Cambridge. Kyle is 1 of 14 students across the United States who won this prestigious award. The Churchill Scholarship will pay all of his University and College fees (approximately $25,000), a living allowance of £13,000 for the twelve-month program, up to $1,000 for one round trip airfare from the United States to the United Kingdom, the cost of his student visa for the United Kingdom, and an additional travel stipend of $500.00. He is also eligible for a Special Research Grant of up to $2,000. Kyle will do a Master of Advanced Study in Astronomy, a new program where he will combine courses in Astrophysics and Mathematics with research in astrophysical fluid dynamics and accretion discs. After Cambridge, Kyle plans to do a doctorate in Theoretical Astrophysics in the United States. For a story from the Northwestern University NewsCenter, see Trumpeting a Music/Science Combo. The TribLocal also did a story on Kyle. See Northwestern music student hits high note with astrophysics. Congratulations Kyle!

2011 Group News

December 2011

CIERA Co-Director, Prof. Vicky Kalogera, is awarded a Simons Foundation Fellowship in Theoretical Physics for her research proposal entitled “Decoding Gravitational-Wave Signals from Compact Object Mergers”. The Fellowship will support a full-year sabbatical leave away from teaching and service work and will allow her to focus on research initiatives within the interdisciplinary environment fostered by CIERA. Per the Foundation’s guidelines “awards are based on the applicant’s scientific accomplishment in the five-year period preceding the application and on a judgment of the potential scientific impact of the leave period.” The Foundation makes up to 20 awards in all areas of theoretical physics each year. More details here.

May 2011

Professor Kalogera’s undergraduate student Michael Tremmel won third place in the Nautral Science and Engineering category in this year’s Undergraduate Research Symposium, with his poster “The Evolution of X-Ray Binaries on Cosmological Timescales”. You can read his full presentation abstract here.

Northwestern University president Morton Schapiro and Evanston mayor Elizabeth Tisdahl got a glimpse of the benefits of a unique new collaboration between the University and local schools this week. They watched Northwestern graduate students, including Professor Kalogera’s graduate student Ben Farr, teach Evanston Township High School (ETHS) students about cutting-edge scientific research as part of Northwestern’s Reach for the Stars program in local schools. Continue reading at the SESP website.

CIERA’s research into black holes has been featured in a video produced for the Big Ten Network. In the clip, a look is given to both the teaching and research aspects of CIERA. Professor Vicky Kalogera and Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, along with graduate students Francesca Valsecchi and Meagan Morscher, offer insight into the stellar phenomenum known as black holes. Graduate student Ben Farr is profiled for his work in teaching students at Evanston Township Highschool about black holes as part of his work with the Reach for the Stars! program.

April 2011

Ben Farr and Carl Rodriguez, two students in Prof. Kalogera’s group. have been accepted into the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.

Daniel Stevens has been awarded a Northwestern Undergraduate Research Grant for Summer 2011. The grant is awarded in support of outstanding and novel research projects of a student’s own design. Daniel is a junior pursuing a major in Physics and Astronomy and in Mathematics and does research in Prof. Kalogera’s group.

Kyle Kremer has received a 2011 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, one of two awarded to Northwestern undergraduates. Each year this prize scholarship recognizes the 300 most outstanding undergraduate students pursuing careers in Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Engineering in the United States. Kyle is a junior pursuing a major in Physics and Astronomy and in Music Performance (trumpet) and does research on compact objects in binary systems in Prof. Kalogera’s group.

Vicky Kalogera gave an Invited Session Introduction titled “Extreme Objects in the Universe” for the German-American Kavli Frontiers of Science Symposium at the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung and U.S. National Academy of Sciences, at Beckman Center, Irvine, California, June 4-7, 2009.

Francesca Valsecchi, Emmanouela Rantsiou, Sourav Chatterjee and Ilya Mandel judged the projects presented by Chicago Public School students at the Meaningful Science Consortium Project Showcase and gave the students a tour of Dearborn Observatory.

Tassos Fragos has been nominated by the Department of Physics and Astronomy to be featured in The Graduate School’s Research Highlights – a section of the Northwestern University website dedicated to promoting the research being done by NU students.

Undergraduate senior Jeff Andrews has decided to join the Astronomy graduate program at Columbia University, choosing among other offers. Congratulations Jeff!

Two of our research undergraduate students, Andrew Loveridge and Michael Tremmel, have been awarded a NU Undergraduate Research Grant in support of their research work in the summer 2009. Andrew works with postdoctoral associate Marc van der Sluys on common-envelope evolution and Michael works with Vicky Kalogera on models of X-ray binaries in the Small Magellanic Cloud. Congratulations Andrew and Michael!

Vicky Kalogera, Ilya Mandel, Francesca Valsecchi, Vivien Raymond, Michael Tremmel, and Jeff Andrews participated in our special event on April 4, 2009 that was part of the 100 Hours of Astronomy a celebration of the International Year of Astronomy. Nearly 200 visitors attended and viewed Saturn and the Moon, listened to presentations by our astronomers and had a wonderful time!

March 2009

Jeremy Sepinsky has taken a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Scranton. Congratulations!

Ilya Mandel, Francesca Valsecchi, Manou Rantisou, and Meagan Morscher manned a booth titled “The Wonders of the Night Sky: The Life and Death of Stars” at the Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School’s science fair in Park Ridge, Illinois on Friday, December 5. They passed out some great education materials from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, and had a terrific time! You can see what a wonderful time they had here.

July 2008

Also included in the article were: Joshua Bloom at UC Berkeley, Julie Castillo-Rogez at NASA’s JPL, Steven Furlanetto at UCLA, Scott Gaudi at Ohio State University, Kelsey Johnson at the University of Virginia, Lisa Kewley at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, Eliot Quataert at UC Berkeley, Alice Shapley at UCLA and Tommaso Treu at UC Santa Barbara.

June 2008

Jeremy Sepinsky is planning his graduation for the end of the summer as he has now accepted an attractive offer for what is almost his dream job: Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Scranton, right in the area where he was raised and discovered his love for science and physics. Congratulations!

May 2008

Tim Linden completed two separate Senior Honors Theses in his two majors: Physics and Astronomy and Integrated Science; both of his theses were selected for the Best Senior Thesis award in each of the majors. Double Congratulations! Following graduation from Northwestern Tim will join UC at Santa Cruz for his graduate studies in Physics and Astronomy.

Vicky Kalogera has been chosen as the recipient of the Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences for the 2007-2008 academic year. Congratulations!

Tim Linden has chosen among several offers to pursue his graduate studies in astrophysics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Congratulations!

Vicky Kalogera gave a Colloquium titled “Compact Objects in Binaries” at the University of Chicago on April 30, 2008.

Vicky Kalogera participated in a press conference on “The Smallest Black Hole” by Shaposhnikov and Titarchuk at the 10th AAS HEAD Meeting in Los Angeles on April 1, 2008. Vicky was quoted in several news reports as an outside expert on the topic:

January 2008

Vicky Kalogera gave an Invited Talk titled “The Birth of Neutron Stars and Black Holes” at the First Midwest Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, on January 19-20, 2008.

Vicky Kalogera, Jeremy Sepinsky and Jeff Chilcote manned a booth titled “The Wonders of the Night Sky: The Life and Death of Stars” at the Theodore Roosevelt Elementary School’s science fair in Park Ridge, Illinois on Friday, November 30. They talked to students about the Chandra Observatory and how Chandra has helped scientists understand the lifecycle of stars, passed out some great education materials from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory Center, and had a terrific time! You can see what a wonderful time they had here.

October 2007

“For her fundamental contributions to the study of the evolution and fate of compact objects in binary systems, focusing on their observations via X-rays and on their importance for gravitational wave detectors.” Congratulations!

April 2007

Vicky Kalogera has been elected as one of the two members at-large of the Executive Committee of the APS Division of Astrophysics. At the end of the summer, Jeff Kaplan will be moving to Caltech for graduate studies in Physics and Alex Muratov will be moving to the Univ. of Michigan for graduate studies in Astronomy. Congratulations to both! Richard O’Shaughnessy gives a talk at the Argonne National Laboratory GLAST Workshop on April 13, “Unravelling short GRBs with LIGO, Swift and GLAST.” Tim Linden was awarded a Northwestern University Summer Undergraduate Research Grant. Congratulations Tim!

August 2006

A new paper is submitted to The Astrophysical Journal: “Theoretical orbital period distributions of cataclysmic variables above the period gap: effects of circumbinary disks” by B. Willems, R. Taam, U. Kolb, G. Dubus, & E. Sandquist.

June 2006

Jeff Kaplan is the recipient of the Katherine L. Kriegbaum Scholarship, which comes with a generous grant to support his research in his senior year amd has been accepted into the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. Congratulations!

April 2006

Chunglee Kim successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis on “Galactic Merger Rates of Pulsar Binaries” on April 26. She will be moving to Cornell to do her postdoctoral work with Jim Cordes. Congratulations Dr. Kim!

March 2006

Chunglee Kim has been awarded the 2006 Luise Meyer-Schutzmeister Memorial Award by The Association of Women in Science (AWIS) Education Foundation. She is a graduate student in her final year and her dissertation work focuses on Merger Rates of Binary Pulsars. She is expected to graduate in May 2006 and will start her postdoctoral studies at Cornell in summer 2006. Congratulations!

The Luise Meyer-Schutzmeister Award is given annually to an outstanding woman graduate student in physics. It is awarded for exceptional academic achievement, the importance of the research being addressed, the quality of the research, and the applicant’s potential for future contributions to the field of physics. Further information on AWIS and their award program can be found at http://www.awis.org/careers/edfoundation.html#graduate.

September 2005

Baby Kalogera, a.k.a. Stefan George Rasio, was born at 6:25 PM on Friday, September 23rd at the Evanston Northwestern Hospital! He is 3.2 kg (about 7lb 2oz) and 52 cm (20.5″). Baby and Vicky are doing great!

Jeff Kaplan has been awarded a University Summer Research Grant to work on the kinematics of binary pulsars during Summer 2005. Congratulations!

Mia Ihm receives the Award for Outstanding Poster Presentation at the 3rd Annual Undergraduate Research Symposium at Northwestern.

Also Mia and fellow NU student Rachel Scheidegger have won the 3rd-place prize as well as the coveted “Sexiest Robot” Award at Northwestern’s 2005 Design Competition. DC is a robotics competition that requires the assembly of complex electronics and robotics to navigate a special course. Participants are typically engineering students, though all Northwestern undergrads are welcome to try. Congratulations!

April 2005

Mia Ihm (NU senior) has been awarded a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) for the coming academic year!

The GRF Program invests in graduate education for a cadre of diverse individuals who demonstrate their potential to successfully complete graduate degree programs in disciplines relevant to the mission of the National Science Foundation. This is a 3-year fellowship that will support Mia’s graduate studies at one of the many programs she has already been accepted.

Jeff Kaplan (NU sophomore) has been selected as a Goldwater Scholar for 2005!

The Goldwater Scholars (320 sophomores and juniors) were selected on the basis of academic merit from a field of 1,091 mathematics, science, and engineering students who were nominated by the faculties of colleges and universities nationwide. One hundred sixty-five of the Scholars are men, 155 are women, and virtually all intend to obtain a Ph.D. as their degree objective. Twenty-seven Scholars are mathematics majors, 239 are science majors, 45 are majoring in engineering, and 9 are computer science related majors. Many of the Scholars have dual majors in a variety of mathematics, science, engineering, and computer disciplines. Goldwater Scholars have very impressive academic qualifications that have garnered the attention of prestigious post-graduate fellowship programs.

March 2005

This Scholarship will allow her to pursue her research on intermediate-mass black holes under the supervision of Sir Martin Rees at the University of Cambridge. Laura intends to continue graduate studies in Astrophysics in the U.S. after she completes her one-year stay in England. She is the first NU student to receive this award in the past six years. The Gates-Cambridge Scholarship is an international scholarship program to enable outstanding graduate students from outside the United Kingdom to study at the University of Cambridge. The Trustees are required to award scholarships on the basis of a person’s intellectual ability, leadership capacity and desire to use their knowledge to contribute to society throughout the world by providing service to their communities and applying their talents and knowledge to improve the lives of others. Successful applicants will have the ability to make a significant contribution to their discipline while in Cambridge, with a strong aptitude for research, analysis and a creative approach to defining and solving problems. Approximately 100 new scholars are selected annually.

Jeremy Sepinsky has been awarded a NASA/Goddard Graduate Student Researchers Program Fellowship for 2004 (renewable for up to 3 years). The NASA GSRP awards fellowships for graduate study leading to masters or doctoral degrees in the fields of science, mathematics, and engineering related to NASA research and development. Jeremy’s NASA Technical Adviser will be Dr. Nicholas White – Congratulations!

Laura Blecha has been selected as this year’s recipient of the annual Outstanding Junior in Physics and Astronomy award. This award is designed to recognize a Physics and Astronomy major in their junior year who has demonstrated exceptional academic achievement in the major and shows great promise for the future.Laura has also been elected as the President of the Society of Physics Students at Northwestern University – Congratulations!

Vicky Kalogera is awarded the Cottrell Scholar Award by the Research Corporation. The Cottrell Scholar Awards are designed for institutions and faculty members who wish to excel at both teaching and research.

Bart Willems and collaborators submitted two new papers to Astronomy & Astrophysics:

March 2004

Laura Blecha will be spending Summer 2004 as an REU student in Mike Zurek’s group at UCLA. Mia Ihm will be spending Summer 2004 as an REU student in George Smoot’s group at LBL. Chris Deloye from UCSB will be joining our group as a postdoctoral associate in the Fall 2004. Vicky Kalogera presents the recent results on the double pulsar J0737-3039 as a LIGO Seminar at Caltech. Philip Nutzman receives graduate program offers from Caltech, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC SantaCruz – Congratulations!

The Evolutionary History of Eccentric Binaries with Neutron Stars and White Dwarfs [see this talk]

2003 Group News

December 2003

A New Relativistic Binary Pulsar has been discovered with the Parkes 64m Radio Telescope! The Implications for Gravitational-Wave Detection of Double Neutron Star Inspiral are Important ! Check out the Press Releases, Movies, and Papers:

September 2003

Postdoctoral research associate Richard O’Shaughnessy joins our group! Come and meet him in F323. Postdoctoral Research Associate Philippe Grandclément is leaving our group taking a new position in France – remember to say goodbye! Grad student Chunglee Kim is presenting her work in a talk at “Advanced School and Conference on Sources of Gravitational Waves”, 15-26 Sep 2003, Trieste, Italy

August 2003

Two new papers have been submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters:

July 2003

June 2003

Graduate student Chunglee Kim passes her qualifying exam – way to go! Graduate student James Jenkins joins the group! Come and meet him in F324. Summer research students Laura Blecha, Dave Guarrera, Mike Henninger, Mia Ihm, Philip Nutzman, and Nicole Yan move to Dearborn Observatory in their own space. Students Dave Guarrera and Mike Henninger graduate – Congratulations! Dave is off to Cambridge, England next year and then MIT for his graduate studies and Mike will spend next year working in the group and will be applying to graduate schools.